Yes, I get a report from BMI about the frequency of performances, and it is very surprising. They played one of my most advanced pieces, and one of my most unusual ones on the radio.
An agent is a person who is sore because an actor gets 90% of what they make.
I definitely learned stuff like advancing a show, what percentage I should be paid, what's going be in a contract I'm going sign.
I do pay performance royalties on others' songs I perform live, but I'm not recording these songs and putting them up for sale.
To the general public, show business may just mean the artistic part, but the dollar and cents element is the reality every performer has to face.
Profile has half the publishing and they control and administer the publishing and distribute and own the records, so our group is a 10-point crew. But we got a lot of money off of the shows.
You can't make money on Broadway. You make nothing. You maybe make like $1,350 a week after you pay out all the producers.
God knows I've had productions where there were actors in my plays who were making more money per week than I was.
The comedians all finished their acts with a song. They would get a certain amount of money from the song publishers and would use that money to pay the writers. None of them paid very much for their comedy material, but it all added up.
We were offered 100 'Sgt. Pepper' shows in Las Vegas with a huge back-end.
My first contract was in 1965. There were six of us in this band - my band before Deep Purple - six in the band plus management, and the entire royalty rate was three-fourths of 1 percent.
In the old days, talent owned their costumes, their intellectual property, their gimmicks. They were not employees and could wrestle anywhere they wanted to, and that just is not case in today's WWE.
When you become a professional wrestler, your name becomes company property.
When you're an actress, there are only a few times you can really get paid. One of them is doing a sequel. They can't fake you or hire another actor to play you.
That folk music led to learning to play, and making things up led to what turns out to be the most lucrative part of the music business - writing, because you get paid every time that song gets played.
I do work a lot. I mean, most of my income, I would say, comes from live performances. And then you've got publishing, you've got record royalties.
All artists deserve compensation for their work, including musicians.
I stand in support of royalty for singers, but sometimes things happen all of a sudden and you have to sign a contract.
